Skipping meals is never a good weight-loss strategy, especially when it come to breakfast. Eating in the morning wakes up your metabolism, helping you burn more calories throughout your day. A solid breakfast also helps keep you feeling sated so you eat fewer calories later. If you're working to drop pounds, keep in mind these four rules to ensure your breakfast is a champion.
Source: Flickr User ccharmon
We are excited to share one of our fave stories from Prevention here on FitSugar!
Yes, you can have your cake (or pizza, or cheeseburger) and eat it too. But you need to learn what "moderation" really means. Here's how.
By Amy Ahlberg, Prevention
You already know that a too-strict eating plan can backfire, resulting in a blowout binge or, worse, throwing you off the wagon altogether. But when it comes to allowing yourself a little leeway, moderation is key. But what does "moderation" even mean? For gourmands, a cheeseburger a week might seem reasonable; for health nuts, maybe it's one every 3 months — minus the cheese and bun. To find out who's right, we turned to Sarah Krieger, RD, and Joan Salge Blake, RD, spokespeople for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. For starters, they say you should only indulge in what you love — and skip the rest. If you don't have a weakness for fries, don't eat them just because they're there; and if you don't have a sweet tooth, don't have dessert simply because your dinner buddy does. "For me, I skip pizza and burgers, but I eat a great-tasting sweet treat every day," says Krieger. "I balance it with exercise and eating a variety of nutritious foods." For more tips, read on. But first, some ground rules:
7 Reasons Your Diet Isn’t Working
Step one: If you're overweight or have health concerns — especially heart disease or diabetes—talk to your doctor. This advice is based on an average 2,000-calorie diet, consumed by American adults at a healthy weight.
We are excited to share one of our fave stories from Fitness Magazine here on FitSugar!
When Cheryl Forberg — registered dietitian, James Beard award-winning chef, and creator of The Biggest Loser meal plan — signed onto the show for its first season, she was shocked at the contestants' states of health. "Most of what I did was not on camera; at the beginning of every season, the applicant pool was huge. Season five alone had 220,000 applicants. Once we weeded applicants out down to about 75, we could start doing physical tests while I met with them to talk about eating habits and their weight loss and weight gain tendencies," she said. "The first season was shocking to hear their eating habits, but after a few seasons, I realized I was hearing the same thing over and over again."
Read below as Forberg shares her experiences with The Biggest Loser, the nutrition factors she used to make the meal plan, and a healthy spread you can make easily at home.
What were you most surprised to discover about with the diets of the past contestants on The Biggest Loser?
I found all the contestants had things in common, like the belief that skipping meals promotes weight loss, drinking too many calories, having too much processed fast food, not eating very many fruits and vegetables, little to no water consumption, not eating enough whole grains, and forgetting to plan ahead. Everybody had a different combination of one these things, but what they all had in common was prioritizing their family, work, or something else over themselves. They needed to put their head in the game and get healthy so that they could be around to take care of the people and things they loved. They needed to start taking care of themselves.
We are pumped to share one of our favorite stories from Health.com here on our site.
By Health.com
It's not just what you eat that can make you more satisfied — it's how you eat, too. Try these tips to feel fuller longer.
H2O some more
Drink two eight-ounce glasses (16 ounces total) of water before each meal. It will fill up your stomach and trim up to 60 calories per meal.
Health.com: Which Foods Burn the Most Fat?
Flavor of the day
Use vinegar (or vinaigrette) and cinnamon for flavor whenever possible. These two ingredients can help regulate blood sugars after meals and help you feel full longer after eating, according to a study from the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences, in Zurich, Switzerland.
We had a chance to chat with Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, over the weekend at the Sundance Film Festival. He's a featured health expert in the new documentary, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which examines the current state of our health care system and provides hopeful solutions based on lifestyle and dietary changes. A big proponent of chronic disease prevention through healthy habits, Dr. Ornish offered up some sound advice and simple changes we can all make to improve our health — chocolate included!
FitSugar: What do you think is the most simple, overlooked thing people can do for their health?
Dr. Ornish: Love more. What you eat, how you respond to stress, how much you exercise, whether or not you smoke, how much love and support you have. But of all those, probably the love and support. Study after study has shown that people who are lonely and depressed are 10 times for likely to die or get sick. You're more likely to smoke and abuse yourself if you're lonely and depressed. It's not enough to just work at a behavioral level and give people information; you have to work at a deeper level.
FS: Everyone has days where they don't want to exercise, how do you motivate yourself on those days?
DO: If I really don't want to, I don't, and then I'll do more the next day. What matters is your overall way of eating and living. So if you don't do something one day, do a little more the next. If I don't have time to meditate for an hour, I'll do it for a minute. It's not all or nothing at any age, and it's really up to you.
FS: People like to stick with their daily habits; how do you get individuals to change their behavior towards healthier choices?
DO: It's about helping people connect the dots between what they do and how they feel, and giving them the tools. Fear is not a sustainable motivator. You can scare people into changing for a few weeks, but not for very long. When you make changes, most people find that they feel so much better so quickly, it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living, and that's what makes it sustainable. Also, to realize that it's not all or nothing. Instead of saying this is good food and this is bad food, and don't ever eat meat, be a vegetarian — I never tell people that. I used to a long time ago and then I realized I was actually not only not helping people, but making it worse. It turns people off because even more than being healthy, people want to be free, so when you tell people what to do they stop listening. If you eat meat five times a day, eat it three times a day or have a meatless Monday and see how you feel. If you don't exercise one day, do a little more the next. Then you start to feel better and then it comes out of your own experience, not because some doctor or some book told you.
To find out Dr. Ornish's surprising favorite indulgence and his take on snacking just read more.
We are excited to share one of our fave stories from Prevention here on FitSugar!
Improve your weight loss plan by avoiding these health diet disasters
By Alyssa Shaffer
Thanks to confusing labels and unearned reputations, it's difficult to know what's good for you. You might automatically reach for items with a "health halo," such as spaghetti sauce (love that lycopene!), or labels like reduced fat!, low sodium!, and whole grain! But unless you're a super savvy shopper, be warned: your diet may conceal some nasty surprises. That low-fat cottage cheese you love? It could be higher in sodium than potato chips. And the low-fat dressing you drizzle on your salad? It could contain nearly as much sugar as two chocolate chip cookies.
The truth is that no manufacturer wants to compromise on flavor, so even healthy-sounding products can contain appalling levels of sugar, salt, and bad fats. To save you time, we've flushed out some of the most surprising diet food offenders — and found some truly healthy alternatives.
5 Weight Loss Excuses You Can Overcome
Fast Food Chicken Caesar Salad
Culprit: McDonald's Premium Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken contains 890 mg of sodium — more than half the recommended daily limit. And that's without the Caesar dressing, which can pile on another 500 mg. (Select the low-fat Italian and it's even 30 percent higher!) In these ready-to-go salads, says Lona Sandon, RD, an assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, "the worst part is usually the chicken, which is often cooked in a high-sodium marinade for flavor and may also be injected with a sodium solution to keep the meat moist."
Smarter choice: Skip the entrée salad and go for the burger with a garden salad on the side. A McDonald's plain hamburger has 520 mg of sodium (250 calories, 9 g fat); add the side salad (20 calories, 0 g fat, 10 mg sodium) or snack-size fruit-and-walnut salad (210 calories, 8 g fat, 60 mg sodium).
Have you fallen prey to other "fake" diet foods? Keep reading to find out!
We are pumped to share one of our favorite stories from Health.com here on FitSugar.
By Leslie Barrie, Health.com
Wish you had your own get-slim dream team? Well, you're in luck: we tapped celebrated weight-loss pros and asked them to share the one strategy they feel makes the biggest difference.
Weave these seven wonders into your daily routine, and you’ll be wowed by how the little changes really do add up.
Trick your taste buds
"Taste buds are malleable little fellas. When they can’t be with the foods they love, they learn to love the foods they're with. Make a short-term commitment to choosing more wholesome closer-to-nature foods with less added salt, sugar, saturated fat, and trans fat. Within weeks, you’ll start to prefer these now-familiar foods."
— David Katz, MD, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center
Health.com: Fat-Proof Your Life
Indulge every day
"Eat a small amount of dark chocolate — I'm talking a 100-calorie piece that’s made of at least 70% cacao—every day. I consider it ‘the daily dark chocolate escape.’ Doing this curbs your cravings for both sweet and salty foods. You’re much more likely to be satisfied and not reach for those cookies or chips. My clients say this allows them to pass up samples at the market without feeling deprived."
— Cynthia Sass, RD, author of Cinch! Conquer Cravings, Drop Pounds, and Lose Inches and co-author of The Ultimate Diet Log
Health.com: 16 Little Ways to Lose Big Pounds
Keep reading! There are more helpful tips after the break.
Even if you're not dieting, following a healthy lifestyle means giving up something you love to eat — or at the very least, not eating it three times a day. That can mean you have to give up some of your favorite indulgences. 
Carrie Fisher knows just what this takes. Carrie's been on Jenny Craig since January, and it's working; she appeared on the Today Show looking 50 pounds lighter. She credits following the program to the ability to lose the weight. "The Jenny Craig food is good! I'm addicted to the cereal," she says. "It tastes like contraband, so it tastes like you're cheating."
Sounds like Carrie's found a useful way to keep her on the diet track — tricking herself into thinking she's eating something bad when it's not. Do you do the same? Take our poll and share your tricks in the comments!
Source: WireImage, Jenny Craig
Whether it's because you spend the days counting calories or because an evening out extends into the wee hours, sometimes you find yourself heading to the kitchen for a late-night fridge pit stop. And while the long-believed rule that eating in the evening will lead to weight gain is a myth, a day of depriving can lead to decisions that compromise your healthy living plans if you're not careful.
If you find your stomach grumbling long after you've wound down for the night, here are some daytime eating habits to adopt.
Check out the rest of my tips after the break.
As much as I love fresh flowers, and I do love fresh flowers, they are apparently not the best home décor decision for someone trying to lose a few pounds. Instead, Dr. Oz says that a fruit-filled centerpiece is the optimal choice. According to his ultimate slim-down plan, "Studies have indicated that people who smelled fruit before a meal lost an average of 30 pounds over the course of six months." The scent of fruit tricks our brains into thinking we've eaten so we feel full faster and eat less. And keeping a fruit bowl nearby may stop us dead in our tracks before we reach for a bag of chips in the kitchen cabinet.
I'm not saying I don't believe Dr. Oz, but I wonder if the mood boost I get from a vase full of hydrangea is worth giving up. Would you be willing to switch out flora for fruit in the name of dieting?
